I'm wondering if anyone has had any success here brewing with saguaro cactus fruit. I've done some searching here on the forums and there was a little discussion somewhere but nothing really about how the final result tasted (or looked). The guy at a local brew store said he had failed the one time he tried, though i didn't get to ask exactly what he meant by "failed".
What i've tried is a belgian saison that I added a pound and a half of the fruit to, that we had just harvested a week earlier and frozen. I heated it up so it melted, then to just barely boiling temp to pasteurize it, then immediately turned off the heat and let it cool down to room temp, then added it to the secondary. That kicked off a whole new fermentation that has been going on for over 2 weeks now, though the bubbling is down to once every 90s or so. The SG is down to only 1.004 (!) (the predicted FG of my saison recipe, w/o the fruit, was 1.011) and the taste is quite alcoholic, almost medicinally so (and the color is a deep cherry red). my fear is that saguaro fruit is so sugary that i basically made the equivalent of a rum ale or something. which is too bad because the fruit is super delicious when it's fresh. I'm also just wondering how much longer I should wait to bottle.
Anyway, just wondering if anyone else has any similar experiments to share.
What i've tried is a belgian saison that I added a pound and a half of the fruit to, that we had just harvested a week earlier and frozen. I heated it up so it melted, then to just barely boiling temp to pasteurize it, then immediately turned off the heat and let it cool down to room temp, then added it to the secondary. That kicked off a whole new fermentation that has been going on for over 2 weeks now, though the bubbling is down to once every 90s or so. The SG is down to only 1.004 (!) (the predicted FG of my saison recipe, w/o the fruit, was 1.011) and the taste is quite alcoholic, almost medicinally so (and the color is a deep cherry red). my fear is that saguaro fruit is so sugary that i basically made the equivalent of a rum ale or something. which is too bad because the fruit is super delicious when it's fresh. I'm also just wondering how much longer I should wait to bottle.
Anyway, just wondering if anyone else has any similar experiments to share.